Website Speed and Performance Optimization

No one waits for a slow website

Get more traffic and boost your rankings

Does it really matter how quickly your website performs? Isn’t your presence in cyberspace good enough to establish you as a legitimate business or brand? Not so much.

There are three very important reasons why your site’s efficiency matters:

1. Usability.

   Research has shown that when a website responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. Users place a great deal of value on website speed and their opinion is crucial to your online (and offline) success. If the user isn’t satisfied, that will lower conversion rates, increase bailout rates, diminish web credibility, tank quality ratings, and, most of all, make user frustration levels skyrocket. Ouch.

2. Search engine rankings.

   Google and other search engines are now incorporating speed and site performance into their search rankings. And every little thing you can do to get your website into the good graces of the search engines will be to your benefit.

3. Cost.

   Doesn’t everything ultimately come down to money? And doesn’t everyone want to save some of the green stuff? Recent data has shown that improving the speed of your website also reduces operating costs. Who doesn’t love that?

Features:

Our goal is to optimize the performance of your website. We will conduct a speed analysis of predetermined individual pages on your site to identify what kind of “energy” it takes to load the pages completely. By pinpointing the factors that are slowing down your site, we can provide our recommendations for speed improvement.

What can negatively impact your site’s speed and performance? Here are just a handful of the typical culprits:

• Poor Web Hosting

  If the hosting environment you have chosen for your website is unhealthy, the results can be toxic for your website. What does “unhealthy” constitute exactly?  It means that you’re working with a hosting company that overloads their servers by hosting too many sites or databases – and this kind of volume hosting can be extremely detrimental to your website. Pictures will take eons to load, clicking back and forth between pages will take too long – and this all adds up to creating cranky site visitors. Internet users demand instant information. If your server is dragging down the speed of your site, you’ll lose customers and clients.

• Inefficient Graphics and Plug-Ins

  Of course you need graphics on your website, but the type, amount, and size of the graphics you choose can affect how well and how quickly they load. Plug-ins and fancy mechanisms that have been installed within your site can also slow down the page and even create errors for some site visitors. This is a discouraging experience for any web surfer – and one that will likely have them turning away from your “buggy” site as quickly as possible (without coming back).

• Neglecting the Three Cs

  Compression, Caching, and Code can all affect the performance of a website. Photos that aren’t saved and uploaded in a website-friendly format will not lend themselves to compression, which eats up space on your site and lengthens load time. If caching is not used, you are limited in the amount of information that can be collected from visitors, thereby hindering your site from loading more quickly on their subsequent visits. And unnecessary, unused, or outdated code – JavaScript, CSS, or HTML – can bog down a website’s functionality.

• Bloated Back Ends

  A poorly configured back end (SQL databases, middleware, CMS, server settings) can significantly affect the performance of your website. Inefficient PHP, outdated modules, misconfigured servers, and slow SQL queries can all affect the load time of your site. In fact, you can realize order-of-magnitude improvements in speed with back-end optimization.

• Web 2.0

  While participating in Web 2.0 is a must in today’s viral marketplace, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like can slow down your site. That doesn’t mean you should nix these valuable applications completely. When Web 2.0 programs are correctly implemented into your design, they won’t impact the speed of your website or frustrate visitors; in fact, the proper implementation of these popular social networking methods will create an enhanced and memorable experience on your site for your audience.

With the advent of widespread broadband, latency has become an important performance issue to address. At broadband speeds, the number of objects and requests that your page requires can affect the load time of your page more than file size! We’ll minimize the number of round trips to the server to make your visitor’s browsers work less and your site display faster, using techniques like CSS sprites, CSS menus, and by eliminating unnecessary requests with standards-based techniques and Ajax and JavaScript optimization.

Still not exactly sure what you need?

Through our speed and performance evaluation of your site and server, we’ll tell you in a detailed report exactly what might be slowing down the pace of your site and why you should change it. The goal, after all, is to enhance what you already have by significantly speeding up your website, amplifying back-end performance, and boosting your search engine rankings. If it seems like our recommendations are going to require a complete overhaul of your content and design, have no fear. The majority of the edits and changes a site needs after our diagnosis can be safely done without disturbing your existing presence in cyberspace – and you can make the backend optimization changes yourself or ask for our assistance.